Curses and a Cup of Magic
by oursolemnhour49
Summary: Most witches and wizards, if they're smart, want nothing to do with ancient curses, and Sophie and Howl Pendragon are no exception. Taking quiet coffee shop work should be enough to avoid dealing with a cursed shipwreck in normal circumstances... but circumstances are never particularly normal for a vain wizard and a strong-minded witch. COMPLETE.
1. In which a job is avoided

**I began writing this in August; it was not supposed to take this long. It was meant to be a birthday present for my lovely friend dragonsong17 and is now a ridiculously belated birthday present/Halloween story. I hope it is worth at least a bit of the wait (I'm hoping the fact updates will be relatively quick will make up for it), and I hope whoever else stumbles across this enjoys it. A late happy birthday to my friend, and a huge thank-you to anyone reading!  
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><p>Sophie Pendragon considered herself open to trying new things, but attempting to use magic to explore a sunken ship was something she felt she could do without trying. This feeling was doubled by the fact that the ship was rumored to have been cursed at the time it went down.<p>

That left her with the problem of how to politely refuse the request of the Kingsbury branch of the Ingary historical society that she and Howl join in their drive to resurface the wreck of the ill-fated _Telarise_, which had sunk under mysterious circumstances in Porthaven harbor a hundred or so years ago.

The trouble with historical societies was that it was hard to make them see why anyone would not want to spend several hours attempting to dredge up the rotten carcass of a ship that might or might not have existed. Sophie's husband Howl had tried his best, though in his case, Sophie could not help but feel "tried his best" meant slithering into the workroom as soon as they had come to the door.

In his defense, these people seemed very persistent, to a degree that was impressive and annoying. For one thing, the letter referred to three previous communications, which Sophie assumed had either gone unanswered or answered in a manner nowhere near firm enough. For another, the letter she had just read was extremely vague on the matter of compensation, and historical societies did not seem the type of organization to have excess funds for the payment of wizards. Sophie considered pointing out in her reply that if the _Telarise_ had such a cargo of treasure as was claimed in the letter, then surely compensation could come from that.

She had no doubt that such a response would get some long-winded lecture about intrinsic historical value and the need for historical preservation.

This was one of the problems of becoming a career witch, Sophie reflected. Everyone assumed there was no limit to the wonders you could do and felt perfectly comfortable asking for a miracle in exchange for a pittance.

The fireplace cracked a little as she stood up from the workbench, and the flames shot up in the shape of something that could almost be called a face. With bright orange flames flicked with purple for eyes and sharp purple flames that were almost like teeth, the face was hardly a human one. Sophie, to whom the face was familiar, was not bothered by this. "Hello, Calcifer," she said. "Is that representative of the Kingsbury Society for the Preservation of Historical Whatsits still waiting at the Kingsbury door?"

"He is," the fire demon said after a moment. "And by the looks of it seems to think that lounging by the door and pretending to read a newspaper will make him look more casual when he meets Howl."

Sophie snorted. "I wish him luck with that. Accosting Howl on anything takes a stronger mind than that which joins a historical society, I think."

"You never know," Calcifer said thoughtfully. "I think it takes a mind of certain strength to decide they want to get people to care about crumbling old ruins. Of course, a mind like that is probably unsound anyway."

"Fair enough," Sophie acknowledged. "I have to respond to this somehow, don't I? I'm sure Howl has ignored the past three letters this thing has mentioned." She waved the letter wearily.

As she was about to try and draft a suitable reply the doorknob, which contained four blobs of paint, one on each side, gave a sharp rattle. Calcifer flickered. "Porthaven," he said. "That'll be Michael."

The door opened with a whooshing sound and a horse stumbled into the castle, looking extremely windswept and disheveled. Sophie burst out laughing as Michael emerged and the horse curled in on itself into the form of a cloak. "I always grab this one!" the apprentice groaned. "Why can't we just make the cloaks unenchanted now that winter's coming? It's not like a witch is after us this year."

"Say that and another one will find a way to chase us all down," Sophie said drily. "Though the rate Howl's tearing around looking for suspicious works of magic, we might have another one on our hands."

Michael blinked. "What is he doing now?"

"If you ask me, he's looking for a way out of this historical society job, and I can't say I blame him," Sophie said. "I'd rather not be a part of it either."

"I suppose," Michael admitted. "I wish he'd get around to changing the cloaks. I thought I grabbed a normal one this time!" He glared at the enchanted cloak which made its wearer take on the appearance of a large horse.

"There is no such thing as a normal cloak in the coat closet of a wizard's castle," Sophie said. "The ones that aren't enchanted are full of spider webs."

The door knob rattled. The rattle was soon followed by Howl entering the castle with an air of breezy triumph that was deeply suspicious to anyone who spent more than a few hours with him. Whenever he came into a room with the look of a conquering hero, Sophie had learned to expect fireworks that were occasionally quite literal. She caught a glimpse of the bustling streets of Kingsbury and an unhappy-looking man almost doubled over with sneezes before Howl slammed the door shut.

Accordingly she made sure to keep a close eye on him as he swept up to her to plant a kiss on her cheek. "You look rather pleased for someone who's spent the entire week dodging shipwreck-obsessed academics," she observed.

"The man out in Kingsbury?" Howl waved a hand. "A misdirection spell was all that…"

Sophie looked him up and down and caught sight of the corner of an envelope in the left-hand pocket of his suit. She made a grab for it and pepper spilled out over the rug. "Truly a misdirection worthy of the terrifying wizard Howl."

"Nothing I do will ever impress you, will it," Howl remarked sadly to the room at large. "Even if I tell you we've found a way to get out of going after that cursed shipwreck?"

"Is the shipwreck really cursed?" Michael asked. He looked skeptical. "I've asked around Porthaven and most people said it went down in a storm."

"Yes, and the Porthaven harbor is full of mermaids who like to eat sailors alive while they're drowning and have magic enough that even fire demons won't mess with them."

"The fact they live in water is more of a hindrance than any magic," Calcifer snapped from the fireplace. "Though I don't see Howl rushing out to deal with them either. Surely a wizard wouldn't be concerned by the chance of getting drowned and devoured?"

Michael was starting to look a little unnerved. Noticing this, Sophie decided enough was enough. "No one is going to the Porthaven harbor," she said firmly. "Not for mermaids or shipwrecks." She had not forgotten the air of triumph swirling around her husband as he entered, and though she had no doubt throwing pepper at the hapless historical society member had something to do with the spring in his step, she could only think of a few things that would inspire him to do something so direct, and that was something urgent.

She was right, but unprepared for what that urgent errand was.

"A coffee shop," was the only thing she could say when Howl had dragged her out to a tiny storefront on a windy corner of one of Kingsbury's smaller streets. "How exactly is working a coffee shop going to get us out of that historical society job?"

The shop, which bore the ridiculous name Bellatissima Cuppa, was dark with a flowery sign in the window indicating that it would be open for business in three days. A large sign that read "Help Wanted" in a business-like print was hanging on the door, along with directions to the stores side door, where interested parties could leave contact information. The interior of the shop was dim, but Sophie could see a long counter with a sort of black box at one end that resembled a sort of metal trunk. Behind the counter was a long shelf that alternated between brightly colored bags and thin jars with a clear panel that seemed to contain tea leaves. Tables were arranged evenly around the rim of the room, and a set of poles joined by a red rope was set between the tables and the counter, likely to indicate a line. A shelf was visible over the rim of the counter, allowing Sophie to see a line of large, almost bowl-like mugs. It looked slightly ridiculous to her, since she could not imagine paying someone else to make coffee that she could make herself, but if it was something other people liked to do, she supposed they were entitled to it.

"Well?"

Howl was watching her expectantly, as if the shop was the clear solution to every problem, and Sophie could not for the life of her tell what he was driving at. This must have shown on her face, for Howl almost ran up to the window and pointed at the metal trunkl-ike object. "That is something from my world," he said firmly. "And I think we should find out why exactly anyone from my world would come into this place only to open up a coffee shop."

"And how are you planning on us getting this job?"

"I've put our contact information in, pretending to be someone who just lost his job at one of the stores here. I mentioned I knew a lady who might need work as well, and said we both were good with customers. And I used one of my better enchantments on the paper to make us look like the most desirable candidates, which we obviously are. After witches, people asking for coffee shouldn't be too hard, especially for you."

"If I were to go for this- which I haven't agreed to, let me remind you- I'm sure I would be fine. You're only good with customers because you run away from the ones you don't like," Sophie replied. "And then you use charms to deal with the rest. How are you going to handle a crowd of people who want coffee quickly?"

Howl chose not to answer this, but the next day the mailbox outside the Kingsbury castle door contained a letter asking to interview both Howl and Sophie under the false names Howl had put on whatever he had left at the coffee shop. Under normal circumstances, Sophie would have ignored the missive and left Howl to haunt the coffee shop however he chose, but since she had been waylaid getting the letter that morning by a gaggle of historical society members clamoring for the help of the castle wizards in resurfacing the wrecked _Telarise_, circumstances were anything but normal.

In an effort to discover what they were so excited about, Michael had gone out to Porthaven bundled in two layers of unenchanted sweaters and found out that a decayed, water-logged, but very identifiable figurehead had washed up in Porthaven harbor. It was still being studied, but since it was a mermaid with ivory shell decorations on the tail, it was quite distinct. If the historians were to be believed, the _Telarise_ had had just such a figurehead.

Even this was not quite enough to convince Sophie that she should interview for a job at a coffee shop so she could snoop around for evidence the proprietor came from Howl's world. But when a stream of couriers from noble families all over Kingsbury began hanging off the doorbell, clamoring for the wizard Howl to help recover the lost treasures of the _Telarise_, she realized she might not have to pretend about wanting to serve coffee.

"What do they all want?" Michael asked, after he and Sophie had practically kicked a messenger from the most noble and illustrious line of Balsam out the castle door. "I never thought nobles would have cared about a shipwreck- ships sink all the time!"

"They do," Howl said, appearing as if by enchantment from his workroom, from which several strange clangs and minor puffs as if from a steam engine had been coming all day. "But those are generally fishing boats, so nobody really cares about losing a bunch of dead fish. If you believe the rumors about the _Telarise_ though, it was carrying a lot of treasure. Some people say it was stolen, other people say it was cursed, and still others say the captain sank the ship and ran off with most of the cargo in the only intact lifeboat."

"But how would he sink the ship and get away with a whole cargo of treasure in a lifeboat?" Michael demanded. "It wouldn't be possible."

"When has that ever stopped rumors about lost treasure?" Sophie said with a groan. Another knock had come at the door, and she snagged Howl's sleeve as he tried to flee for the workroom. "No, you don't! You think these people are just as ridiculous as I do and you can tell them so, if you've got the backbone for it!"

Howl spluttered with protest but before he could find something coherent to say, Michael had opened the door with a wary slowness.

A middle-aged man was standing there in clothes too rich for a footman and an air too nervous for a nobleman. "Is this the residence of the wizard Howl?" he asked. His shoulders were pulled up close to his head, making him look like a turtle about to venture out of its shell. Since he was wearing a rich black velvet cloak decorated with a sliver-and-blue crest, the resemblance was even more striking.

Sophie maintained her grip on Howl's flowing green shirt sleeve as he tried to discreetly extricate himself from her grip. "Yes," she said quickly. "Howl's right here, he was actually just coming to help you."

"Oh? How… well, very kind, of course." The resemblance to a turtle creeping out of a shell became more pronounced as the man's shoulders relaxed. "I wanted to ask about- well, it's my mother, really, but at any rate, she said you were the person to go to for spells. We need a finding one- she's lost a necklace."

Howl looked torn between relief at not being demanded to plumb the depths of the Porthaven harbor and annoyance at having been tricked into confronting someone directly. But it was only for a moment, and his natural habit of charming nobles out the door began to assert itself. He listened to the man's problem, which to Sophie's ears seemed to largely consist of an elderly mother who could not admit she might have lost a necklace. Howl discussed a finding spell that involved smearing the house with a special kind of gel, which caused such a look of horror to cross the nobleman's face that Sophie almost laughed. There was a powder that could work for findings that was much less messy than the gel, and she was about to mention that before guiltily remembering that she had used the last of it the previous week to help her sister Lettie track down a lost picture of her and her husband's wedding.

At long last Howl was able to get rid of the nobleman, who persisted in puttering about and stammering without actually committing to anything. As soon as he was out of the door, a series of knocks burst in at the Porthaven door. Michael swung the knob that way and peeked out the window. His face turned pale. "Sophie!"

She joined him and saw a group of seven very earnest-looking people, all with handfuls of papers and hopeful looks, waiting outside the door. She was sure she recognized the man from Howl's pepper escapade the previous day at the forefront, and he was carrying a paper with a very official-looking seal. "Oh no," she groaned. "Howl, we have trouble. I think he got some kind of endorsement from the king. Or at any rate, one of the academics did."

Howl took one look and whirled away as if he had not noticed anything at all. "We're not at home," he said quickly. "In fact, we're taking the interview for that coffee shop job today and we're going to tell everyone that we've got a task of world-shattering importance no matter what comes of it. And since I'm sure that owner is from my world anyway, it technically is a matter of world importance."

That was how Sophie found herself and Howl pretending to Kingsbury residents looking for work before the fishy-faced owner of the coffee shop in his tiny back office, and how she and Howl found themselves opening a coffee shop at a truly absurd morning hour two days later.


	2. In which there are mysterious cups

**Ideally this was going to update on Wednesdays, but that ended up not working out. Joys of real life and adulthood...**

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><p>There were doubtless people in Ingary immune to the magic of a cup of coffee, but at this particular morning hour, it seemed to Sophie that everyone in the land was under a spell that could only be broken by the bitter taste of burned-over beans mixed with water. She looked at the string of customers curling around the corner of the counter and reminded herself that situations like this were to be expected when one's husband was inclined to investigate mysterious coffee shops through undercover employment.<p>

However, just because a situation was expected did not mean one had to deal with alone. After making the first drink- a coffee without embellishment for a man who looked like he was recovering from a bout of excess drinking- Sophie found an excuse to sprint to the backroom for more mugs. As soon as she got there, she almost ran into the man who had gotten her into this mess in the first place. He was crouching by one of the plain wooden cupboards in the back, running his hands all over the wood and scowling. Sophie did not want to give Howl the satisfaction of asking what the matter was, particularly since the customers presented a more pressing problem then a plain wooden cupboard.

Before she could say anything, he began to trace the edges of the polished metal hinges. "Sophie, dear, I don't suppose your eagle eye can catch anything unusual about this cupboard?"

"It's very impressive in it proves your capacity to sneak out of everything, even the things you said you wanted to do," she replied unsympathetically. "There's a line of customers out there and I can't stay back here long."

"Of course not!" Howl replied. He adopted a look of pained self-righteousness that Sophie had seen far too many times to be fooled by. "Leaving customers waiting- Sophie, I'm surprised at you. You would never have done such a thing at the castle."

Sophie grabbed two large white ceramic mugs, wincing at how they clanked together, and told herself that chucking one at him would disrupt the coffee shop ambience the owner had blathered on about maintaining in their training session the previous day. Grabbing Howl with her free hand, she dragged him out the door and concentrated on taking orders for the next several minutes. Mainly, she found herself having to concentrate on adding the right amount of coffee to the cup. The worst orders to take were the ones where the person waiting for the drink asked her to add milk or sugar. Sophie had to bite her tongue to keep from asking them why they simply did not add these things themselves.

After one lady squealed in horror about how her corsets would simply burst out of her dress with that much cream, Sophie could feel her hands shaking as she gripped the blue porcelain milk jug. Howl was using the strange machine that looked like a gigantic metal box. It had a wand protruding from a sort of undercut shelf, that shot steam at boiling temperatures and was rather dangerous to handle without paying it full attention, but he met her eyes and as Sophie struggled with the pitcher, his hands steadied the mug she was dealing with quite gently.

"It's quite a busy morning," he said to the lady with a smile so charming that it seemed to make the line of people overjoyed at the surplus of activity. Sophie managed to finish pouring the milk with a flourish and a forced smile. Howl took it from her and handed it to the lady with a bow. "I do hope you'll enjoy this," he said.

From the crowd's reaction, they might have watched the closing act of a suspenseful play. Sophie straightened her back with only the faintest snort. Given that she was working at the Bellatissima Cuppa under the name Anne Jenkins, a nice Kingsbury lady who'd fallen on trying financial times, she would have to pretend to respect the people who were too lazy to pour cream into their own coffee. Sophie Pendragon would have shoved the cup back at anyone who told her to "dump out just a little coffee so there's more room for the cream."

Ann Jenkins would have to smile and say "Of course, my lady, and is there anything else I can get for you?"

She left Howl to deal with the people who were not staying in the shop- these people took their drinks in cups made of a strange stiff substance that was not quite paper and reminded Sophie of a stronger version of bakery boxes. They came with shiny lids that seemed to spring and leap off the edges of the cups, and after three different incidents of spilling hot coffee on her fingers, she had decided they were best left to Howl.

After a frantic rush of people racing to the counter to gasp out orders, dance from one foot to the other, and dash out of the shop as soon as their drinks had been made, the pace of the morning slowed considerably. Howl vanished to the back room again, muttering something about restocking. This left Sophie to the only course of investigation she really knew: snooping while cleaning

The real trouble with investigating something like a shop like the Bellatissima Cuppa, Sophie thought as she grabbed a broom, was that she did not really know what an ordinary coffee shop would look like. She had seen a tea shop in Kingsbury after getting hopelessly lost on her way to visit her sister once. There were a few restaurants in Market Chipping, and one little place had served breakfast on the weekends. But if a place regularly served snacks for people at over-high prices in her home town, Sophie had never been there. She knew from her work at the former family hat shop that customers were tricky people to deal with, and she knew from her work as a witch that fumbling the ingredients of potions, whether they were sore-throat-relief spells or complicated coffee drinks, was a recipe for general unhappiness.

Yet there was a peculiar prickliness to the people who waiting for their sugary non-magical potions that left Sophie at a total loss. She was familiar with ladies who were notoriously hard to please about their hats. To a certain extent, she could sympathize with being hard to please about a hat, since the best ones tended to cost a good bit of money. But to make such a fuss about coffee, a drink easy to make at home to one's own taste, convinced Sophie that a good portion of people in Kingsbury simply wanted an excuse to throw their own weight around. Given how many of them tried to cram three four-horse carriages into streets barely wide enough for one, this did not surprise her particularly.

A few people were scattered around the shop, but since most of the tables were unoccupied, she was able to sweep between chairs without disturbing anyone. The little stand in the far left corner of the shop, just near the open end of the counter where the finished drinks were left, was covered with spilt bits of sugar and drops of cream. The tray for the used mugs was full almost to bursting. Sophie seized the mugs and hauled them to the back room. A few clean rags and warm water were enough to set the stand right again, though the sugar canister needed to be refilled. The morning shift would be ending at noon sharp, which meant she and Howl had approximately half an hour to do their investigating.

She began to clean the tables, dragging out the business by wiping and rinsing the surface of each. While she let those dry, she gave the chairs a quick swipe with the rag, which allowed her to study the floor, the makings of the chairs, and the underside of the table- none of which seemed out-of-the-ordinary. The chairs were a smooth dark wood with square backs, the same kind Sophie had seen in one of Kingsbury's cheaper restaurants. The tables rested on one leg with a four-pronged base and had garish orange tops the same color as the mandatory employee aprons. Though she swept under them and cleaned them and realigned them for an orderly appearance, there seemed to be nothing remarkable about them. They were simply chairs and tables.

The conversations between the tables were equally unsuspicious, though the _Telarise_ had become the subject of much discussion ever since the king had issued a decree that any item from the shipwreck was to be considered of historical value. Rumors had been flying about treasure hunts, with quite a few curses and grisly ghost stories mingled among them. Two men dressed as palace clerks were animatedly discussing whether the sailors had murdered the captain in his sleep, which in turn caused their ghosts to haunt the Porthaven harbor, or whether the reverse had happened. Sophie wished she could explain to them that curses did not involve ghosts, but a coffee spill that had been hidden in a table's shadow ended up preventing further eavesdropping.

No sooner had she cleaned that than a lady in a flowing brown dress swept into the store and requested the sweetest drink they had on the menu. Sophie took the order and left Howl to make it. The dishes in the back needed to be washed, and all were sticky and stained. One mug, a rather pretty white one with a border of blue flowers on the inside, had a jagged chip on the inside of the rim. Sophie almost groaned when she saw it. One of the rules that the owner of the shop had been adamant on when telling her and Howl about his standards was that the dishes had to be pitch-perfect.

"It is absolutely essential that we create the most comfortable and relaxing atmosphere for every guest that comes through our doors," he had said after completing Howl and Sophie's interviews and giving them a tour of the shop. "Every mug needs to be spotless and every table and chair needs to be sparkling. People should comfortable and happy here, as if they were in their own homes."

Sophie ran her thumb over the chip in the rim. There would be no using this mug again, even though a good rinsing it would be perfectly serviceable again. She had no idea what to do with it and set it on the counter while she cleaned the rest.

When she had finished, she was surprised to see that Howl had grabbed the cup and was studying it intently. "Are you seeing charms in the flowers?" she asked. There was a bit of a snap in her voice, given how many dishes she had just washed without help, but Howl did not seem to notice.

Sophie considered chucking her dishrag at him, but before she could, the little dark-haired girl who was slated to come in at noon burst into the kitchen. "Oh, hello, Ann and Paul! I know I'm a bit early, but Mum told me to make sure I wasn't late." She gave them a smile and began tying on her apron.

Howl was still focusing on the mug and seemed to have forgotten that his name at the coffee shop was known as Paul Simpson. Sophie had to discreetly step on his toes to remind him that the girl, whose name was Dorothy Matling, was trying to ask him a question about the coffee machine. She seemed to have a much better grasp on the machine than Sophie did, but only Howl and Caspar Sedgwick, the man who owned the shop and who was scheduled to work alongside Dorothy that afternoon, seemed to really get how to make it work properly.

After tinkering with the machine for a minute, Howl turned to Sophie. "I guess I'll be off," he said with a winning smile. "Be seeing you tomorrow morning, bright and early?"

Sophie grunted. Howl brushed past and went out the back door. Sophie was tempted to follow, but in the end she waited until Caspar Sedgwick made his appearance to prevent Dorothy having to deal with the lunch crowd by herself. It would be better for their cover if she and Paul Simpson appeared to have no connection beyond their shared morning shifts. If the owner of the shop was concocting some kind of sorcerous plan through this place, it would be better if he did not realize that two of his employees were actually a married wizard and witch bent on snooping around his shop.

The owner in question arrived seven minutes late, just as the last member of a long lunch line was scooping up his large mug of frothy milk with a hint of extra-bitter coffee from the machine. His hair and coat were damp as if he had been caught in a rain shower, but his shoes and trousers were impeccably neat. Sophie knew that seven minutes' lag could easily be explained something as simple as a carriage with a slow horse, but she found his lateness irritating nonetheless. She consoled herself with thinking that his spotless shoes would doubtless have something sticky spilled on them before the day was out.

She gave him another glance as he made his way to the back room to put on his apron. Even in the light of the shop, he was every bit as unnerving to look at as he had been when he had interviewed her and Howl. Caspar Sedgwick was a thin man so colorless he looked like he might have stepped outside of the black-and-white pictures Sophie had seen in some of Howl's books. He had pale straw colored hair, a complexion somewhat healthier than that of a corpse, and thin hands that hung limply off his wrists. If not for the fact that his grey eyes were sharp and alert, Sophie would almost have thought him to be a witch or wizard's puppet.

It bewildered her that such a man did not scare the customers straight out of their seats, but as she took off her apron and made her way toward the front door, she realized he did have some charm. Sedgwick seemed to have a gift for really listening to people. The man at the counter had already started telling all about his day and how his employer was asking for him to get twice as many ledgers updated as normal, which simply wasn't fair since the man already did twice as much checking and updating as any other clerk in the shop, and if the boss wanted that much work done, then surely he could get one of the other clerks in on it. Sedgwick was nodding and making sympathetic murmurs and looking genuinely aggrieved on the man's behalf, and all the while his hands were flying through the coffee bags and syrup bottles as if they had a life of their own.

Sophie realized she was staring and made her way to the door as quickly as she could. Goodness, she could not help but think, if the man can do that much in just a few minutes, it's lucky he doesn't have half the town here to complain about their troubles.

Perhaps this was where the man's magic lay, she thought as she made her way carefully to the Kingsbury house that served as the front to the moving castle. Sophie was still not particularly good at identifying enchantments and spells, so she would have to find a way to get Howl nearby him to see if Sedgwick's ability to get customers talking had anything unnatural in it. After all, some people naturally had a gift for such things. Certainly Sedgwick had given no indication of such abilities when he hired them, though it was hard to say if that was due to the fact that Howl had insisted they wear as many spells as possible to conceal a person's magical ability during their interviews. Now that they had been hired, Sophie was content with a simple appearance-altering glamor, though Howl had unsurprisingly proven too vain to do more than his magic-dampening charm.

She got back to the castle with only two wrong turns along the way and heaved a sigh of relief as she stepped into the warm sitting room. With only five minutes or so to work with, the wind had done its best to turn her into an ice sculpture, or so it felt in her hands and feet. "Hello, Calcifer," she said. "Has Howl come in yet?"

"He got back a few minutes ago with something wrapped in bright orange cloth," the fire demon replied. "I think he took it to his workbench before going out again. He went out the Porthaven door, but he didn't say when he was coming back."

"Slithered off again," Sophie grumbled. She had a feeling Howl knew how irritated she had been by his scrambling around in the back while she waited on customers. Pulling off the kerchief that had been enchanted to make her look like a tall dark-haired lady in her mid-thirties, she wandered over to Howl's workbench. The chipped cup with blue flowers was resting on it, looking quite out of place among the packages of powder and the skull.

Sophie picked it up and examined it. Apart from the chip on the inside rim, it seemed like a perfectly ordinary cup, if rather wider and flatter than most mugs in Kingsbury. She checked the flowers for some kind of charm or spell.

Any object that had been enchanted to do something out of the ordinary generally showed it, but only in the most mundane ways. For instance, if the mug had been charmed to make anyone drinking out of it so happy with their drink that they would come back for another the next day, the flowers might be shinier than the rest of the mug, twinkling with the strength of the spell. The trouble was that in that instance, it was equally possible the flowers could be painted with a shiny sort of paint. Howl, who had been on both the working and the receiving end of magic for several years, had a good eye for picking out charms. Sophie, who had only been practicing serious magic for about a year, was far better at crafting them than spotting them.

As she stared at the cup, the door opened onto the little streets of Market Chipping. Sophie turned in time to see Michael come inside. He shivered a little as he removed two sweaters. "It's awfully cold in Market Chipping," he said. "It's almost like winter instead of fall. And I couldn't find any sign of a shop that was like the one Howl described. Why does he want to find a shop that sells nothing but coffee? We can make coffee here and I thought Howl liked tea better anyway. And there's that one in Kingsbury!"

Before Sophie could answer, a splutter of sparks drew their attention to the fireplace. "About that," Calcifer said. "Someone did come to the door while you were out, at the Kingsbury door. He seemed to be rather annoyed when no one answered the door. I thought he wouldn't leave, he spent about twenty minutes outside before giving up."

Sophie almost groaned. "Was this someone wearing a black cloak with a silver-and-blue coat of arms on the left shoulder?"

Michael was standing, a sweater still in hand, with a bewildered expression on his face. "Wait a minute, Sophie, was that someone important? Should I not have gone out?"

"Don't worry about it," Sophie told him briskly. "This isn't your fault, it's the fault of that overdressed excuse for a wizard who can't be bothered to grow a spine and tell a client he's not interested in looking for his aged mother's priceless necktie that got lost after goodness knows how many years."

"It was a lost necklace," Howl said, coming through the Porthaven door with such impeccable timing that Sophie was convinced he had been hanging around outside the door listening. Given that it was pouring in the harbor town, she found this a rather impressive dedication to making an entrance. He hung his cape up with what seemed a very unnecessary flourish and spun to face the room. "And he's asking because she's bored and happened to discover the necklace was missing while in a fit of cleaning, which means the poor man is probably at a loss for how to stop her."

Sophie raised an eyebrow and Howl hurriedly went on. "At any rate, I can't be bothered with a necklace. Look at this!"

He drew something out of the bag at his side with a grand sweeping gesture that nearly knocked Michael into the coat closet. In his hand was a cup made of some kind of peculiarly stiff paper with some kind of fish emblem on the side.

* * *

><p><strong>I have no proof that Howl actually likes tea better than coffee, though I reread HMC quite a few times to check- though that doesn't rule out the possibility of my missing it. Of course it might have been mentioned at some point in House of Many Ways, which I only skimmed to double-check the Howl and Sophie bits. Anyhow, if it's blatantly contradicted at some point in the canon, just let me know and I can switch the line out. As always, comments and critique are welcome!<br>**


	3. In which a new job is taken

"It's a cup," Michael said after a moment. "Howl, unless someone paid you in Porthaven, you probably should bother with the necklace soon. Especially if you're going to buy drinks that you could make yourself."

"I did not spend extra money on this thing," Howl said, adopting an air of injured self-righteousness. He swept to the workbench. "I appropriated it for investigative purposes."

"So you stole it," Calcifer said with a rather wicked smile, at the same time Sophie asked, "So what place did you break into to get it?"

Howl arranged his long face into an aggrieved expression. "It's hardly stealing if it could help catch a swindler who's probably being used by someone smarter for goodness knows what. And I didn't break in anywhere, I merely wandered into an open back door of a little coffee shop that's recently opened in Porthaven that happens to have a suspicious resemblance to the ridiculous place in Kingsbury."

"Why did you take the cup from the Kingsbury shop in the first place?" Sophie asked.

Howl was already bent over the cup from Kingsbury, regarding it with such intensity that Sophie half-expected to see scorch marks on the side. "Michael, could you pass the fifth jar from the right on the third shelf?" He waved a hand vaguely at the shelves on the wall to his right where several books and glass bottles were arranged in a mingled heap.

Michael fetched the jar, which was filled with grainy powder the color of charcoal. Little flicks of lighter material were visible inside, and occasionally there was a sparkle as a grain caught the light. Howl rubbed a bit of it onto his fingers, turning them a dusty grey, and then ran his forefinger around the inside of the paper cup and then the outside.

The paper flared and sparked wherever the dust had touched it, but it did not catch fire. Howl did not regard this as much of a surprise, and turned his attention to the mug from Kingsbury, thoroughly smearing it with the same powder.

They all watched the mug for a moment.

"Well," Sophie said at last, "it appears you've found a way to undo my cleaning skills. Does this mean the shop's dishes will be perpetually dirty as part of Sedgwick's nefarious plan?"

Howl glared at the mug as if its ordinariness offended him. "But that isn't right," he muttered to himself. "Everything about those places stinks of my old world. That paper cup from Porthaven definitely came from my world. Probably from the store that fish emblem so blatantly copies."

Sophie blinked. "There are shops like that in your world?"

"My world is infested with them," Howl said. He sat back wearing an expression of extreme distaste. "They seem to crop up everywhere imaginable, fill up with exactly the same kind of people. And they can't make a decent drink without filling it with enough sugar to kill a human of weaker constitution."

Michael looked bewildered. "I tried one of the drinks at the Porthaven shop a few days ago- it was so bitter I couldn't finish it. That's what you call sweet?"

"Well, if you get just a coffee without anything else, of course it's going to be bitter," Howl snipped. "And for all I know the drinks at the place we work at are fine. But I don't like seeing something like that crop up in this world. It isn't right."

Sophie picked up the smudged cup. "So you thought maybe this cup came from your own world- is that what the dust was for?"

Howl nodded. "There are some ways to hide if something came from my world, but if that Sedgwick person came from my world to start a business, it's quite likely he doesn't know what he's doing."

"Says the man who made a contract with a fire demon the first chance he got," Sophie pointed out. "Anyway, why do you think he's from your world? You said yourself the mug was ordinary, and the shop looked fairly ordinary when I cleaned it- why would he come all the way from your world to open up a coffee shop? Why not take magic from this world into yours or something like that?"

"I have no idea why he would come to this world to start a coffee shop- I have no idea why anyone would start a coffee shop, now that I think about it. But I can tell you this- that machine we use to make the drinks is definitely from my world. I should know, I burned myself on a similar one often enough when I was younger."

Sophie remembered the rather snappish tone in his voice when he'd talked about the coffee shops in his own world. "Are you telling me that you've been in one of those stores you were ranting about so much?"

Howl assumed a lofty expression. "I only stayed for a short time. The people there didn't appreciate the work I did to try and improve some of their drinks."

Sophie grinned. "So you wouldn't do what your employer told you to do and you were fired."

"I wouldn't put it that way," Howl sniffed. "It was a mutual parting that came after one week."

Sophie burst out laughing. "Well, that explains why you can handle the machine, but honestly, Howl! They wanted you to do your job!"

"I realized a very short time after that I could make a better living at wizardry," Howl replied. He got up from the workbench just as a knock came at the door.

"Kingsbury," Calcifer said. "And he keeps pacing back and forth, so I think it might be urgent."

"Oh, bother it," Howl sighed. "It's probably that nobleman again. Sophie, would you be a dear and tell him I'm off on urgent business with the king?"

"You can tell him yourself," she replied. "I have a mug to wash off. And besides, weren't you the one saying you could make a better living at being a wizard? It's a profession you might want to consider working at some time."

"You wound me," Howl sighed, but he did not look particularly wounded, just put out. "Michael, I don't suppose…"

"You assigned me that summoning spell for household items," Michael said promptly. "I still can't get it to work for objects more than two feet away and really should be practicing it."

Another knock came at the door. Sophie moved for the kitchen, and Michael became absorbed in a small scrap of paper that had appeared in his hand out of nowhere. Howl sighed heavily, but no one took any notice, and he eventually opened the door.

Sophie plunged the cup under some hot water, and wiped it clean in the kitchen before returning to the workroom, where Howl was in the middle of a very flowery speech.

"… with no doubt whatsoever of the value of the necklace, but I do have to wonder if I'm truly the best person for a job this delicate. You must understand, my magic tends to cause upsets and spectacles, and from what you've told me of your mother, she wants nothing more than peace and quiet. I can give you a simple finding spell, it would be quite easy for her to use."

Something about the way the way the nobleman was looking at Howl reminded Sophie of a pleading dog. "But you must understand, it's not- that is- I really…" he was stammering. "You see, my mother is adamant about a wizard coming to help her. She really is convinced that someone broke into her jewel room and stole the necklace, and since she keeps that room locked behind two different doors, it is very hard to understand how it could have vanished, and I find it hard to believe that she could have lost it…"

It sounds like she's refused to even let you consider the possibility of it being lost, Sophie thought.

Aloud, she said, "Perhaps your mother would consider a witch coming to investigate?"

Both the nobleman and Howl spun to look at her, the latter with outright relief and the former with unmistakable surprise. "A witch?" the nobleman said at last. "I- do you mean you? You hardly look like a witch, my- I mean, miss- I mean…"

"Sophie Pendragon," Sophie said crisply. "And I am a witch, though I may not look it at the moment. The day will come soon enough, I'm sure. I don't believe we've been introduced, sir…"

"Twinings, Lord Twinings." He endeavored to straighten his shoulders, Sophie supposed in an effort to look more highborn, and bowed. "An honor to meet the wife of a wizard so distinguished."

Only in noble circles could such limp praise be considered polite, Sophie thought. "I'm glad to have made such a good impression," she said with as straight a face as she could manage. "If you'll provide your address, I can stop by first thing tomorrow morning. Would that suit you and your mother?"

She saw Howl cough a little out of the corner of her eye and resolutely did not look at him. The nobleman himself remained oblivious. "I- but of course, madam, that would be ideal." He sounded uncertain and from the way he looked at Sophie, she could tell he was not quite convinced that she was a witch. She pondered sending a charm with him, or on him, but in the end, decided her magic was going to be better saved for the mother. After all, the mother was the one who clearly ran the house.

After Howl had taken the address and bowed the nobleman out of the house, he immediately turned to Sophie. "First thing tomorrow morning? Even when the coffee shop is there and looking more suspicious with every moment?"

Sophie snorted. "It may not be the most normal place in Kingsbury, but it's the height of tradition compared to a moving castle. Besides, I hate opening that place already and I've only done it once. You can go and deal with Sedgwick- tell him I was just too sick to be allowed near the food."

The next morning went smoothly enough, though Howl was grumbling the entire time about Sophie's so-called desertion. Sophie had responded by burrowing into the blankets and making a great show of how comfortable the bed was, though she had to get up when Howl burned the bacon. He claimed it was an accident. Sophie had disagreed and the resulting argument had resulted in Howl rushing out the Kingsbury door rather later than he or Sophie had expected. Sophie herself had barely had time to brush her hair and change into something decent before heading out the Kingsbury door for the address Twinings had given.

It was a much smaller house than Sophie was expecting, made of dark red brick with a rather dispirited-looking gate. From outside she could see traces of rich curtains at the edges of the windows, but the front lawn was a bit tangled, with odd weeds and flowers cropping up in the tufts of grass. Inside, the furniture was a little faded and covered with rich fabric. Little tables seemed to be everywhere, all covered with brass lamps. An old lady was sitting in the armchair in the front room, holding a cane and holding herself so stiffly that she looked as if she had been posed. She swept Sophie with pinpoint grey eyes and her mouth pursed.

"You don't look like a witch," was her greeting.

Sophie raised an eyebrow. "No, Lady Twinings, I suppose not. I assure you, I have a great deal of experience with witchcraft."

The old lady gestured with her cane to the chair opposite her own. No doubt she thought it made her look very grand, but after facing two very powerful witches in their own homes, Sophie did not feel particularly impressed. She sat down. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lord Twinings shuffle to the side of the door, almost like a footman.

The old lady gave him a withering look. "I suppose my idiot son told you about my lost necklace in a way that made me sound like a scatter-brained old fool who can't keep track of her own jewelry."

Sophie tried not look at the man behind her and tried not to give this woman a strict talking to on his behalf. She was not fond of spineless people any more than this lady seemed to be, but having met Lady Twinings, she could understand why her son had grown up as spineless as he had. "I heard that the necklace is gone, Lady Twinings," she said briskly. "I don't know if was through it getting lost track of, or theft, or whether it fell off. It doesn't matter. If you'd like it found, I'll find it."

"Well, I hope you do. That necklace is quite old, really one of the prizes of my collection. It was made from twelve different gems all of _very_ significant historical value. In fact," she leaned forward with the air of someone confiding a grand secret, "the centerpiece stone was rumored to have come from wreck of the _Telarise_. It's _quite_ the historical object, that sapphire."

Sophie wondered if she was ever going to be able to dodge the cursed shipwreck that seemed determined to wind its way into her and Howl's affairs. She stood. "Very interesting- I'm sure it will help me a great deal in looking for it. If you're ready, perhaps we can go to the room where you kept the necklace?"

Without waiting for Lady Twinings to actually agree, she went out to the hall and fixed the son with a stare that she hoped did not resemble his mother's glare. He straightened up, and Sophie made for the stairs boldly, hoping that the jewel room mentioned was actually on the second floor. Since Lord Twinings began to follow her and did not call her back, she assumed it was. Luckily, she was right.

The room where Lady Twinings kept her jewels turned out to be an enormous closet in one of the many rooms on the second floor. The closet door was bolted and locked with two heavy sliding bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. The bolts slid into notches in the floor and in the ceiling and when pulled back, the door swung open to reveal a narrow passage and another door with an ornate lock. Sophie thought this was excessive until Lord Twinings pulled out a massive key from his jacket and opened the door to reveal a room practically smothered in jewelry. Necklaces, rings, and bracelets were draped all over display stands, many of them gathering dust. Almost all of them featured blue stones set in silver. "Lady Twinings wears all of these?" she asked in amazement.

"She likes to wear as many as possible," the lord said, sounding a little stuffy.

Sophie bit back a sigh and walked forward into the room. "What did the necklace that was taken look like?"

"It rested here." Lord Twinings shuffled past and took down a black velvet display. Sophie could see the case had been moved at least once recently, judging from the disturbed ring of dust. Lord Twinings was about to give her the display case, but a glint on the back of the shelf caught Sophie's eye. She reached past and caught a tiny piece of metal in her fingers. It looked like a piece of filigree that had been torn off something.

"Did the necklace have any stone or setting that made it unusual?" she asked.

"Well, it was very old," Lord Twinings said after a moment. "I believe it may have had a blue stone."

Sophie glanced around the sapphire-studded room. "Well, that narrows things down considerably," she remarked. She looked at the little curlicue of metal and began to look around at the floor behind the shelf. In a moment, she saw what she was looking for. A large necklace setting was curled like a discarded party favor at the gap between the floor and the bottom shelf. Sophie gathered it up and held it up for Lord Twinings' inspection.

He started to splutter and turned the color of curdled milk. "I don't- I never- how could she have missed it? She was in here for several minutes looking."

With difficulty Sophie refrained from pointing out that Lady Twinings did not seem the type of woman to search for anything, much less lower her dignity enough to crawl around on the floor and look for something that might have fallen. However, as she moved out into the light, it became obvious the necklace was missing something. A gigantic gap was in the center of the necklace, which looked particularly garish with the surrounding smaller gemstones. Sophie regarded it for a moment.

"All right," she murmured after a moment. "So I'm guessing all of you spent a fair amount of time together- you and you." She touched the stones and the necklace with her fingertips, trying very hard to think. "If any of you came from the same mine, or were cut by the same jeweler- do you think you could lead me to the stone that went missing? I'm sure you'd know the cut, the shape, and even the color of the missing piece, and my friend and I hear would like to find it."

"Are you mad, woman?" Lord Twinings exclaimed. "We're paying you for magic and you come in here and insult us with fanciful-"

"Lord Twinings, be quiet," Sophie snapped. "Look at the necklace."

It had begun to tug at Sophie's fingers, and the ends were standing out straight, pointing past Lord Twinings toward the door.

She followed and it was not until it led her out into the street that Sophie realized it would be a good idea for Lord Twinings, whose shuffle had practically turned to a sprint in his panic to go after her, to fetch his carriage. They rode back to Kingsbury, the tugging of the necklace growing stronger as they made their way through the twisting streets. At last the necklace stopped tugging, though its ends were still pointing straight out like accusing fingers. Sophie and Lord Twinings stepped out of the carriage and found themselves standing in front of the Bellatissima Cuppa.

* * *

><p><strong>And whatever could be the reason for that? Find out... later. Maybe not next time specifically.<br>**

**Since Megan mentions Howl going to grad school, I feel like at some point he'd have been told to do some actual work. I'm also sure he'd be terrible at it and would have been lucky to last a week anywhere.**


	4. In which new facts come to light

Sophie was able to convince Lord Twinings not to charge into the shop with some difficulty and left him spluttering in his carriage while she drew her coat about her. Dark hair was really the only disguise that her glamour gave her when she worked as Ann Hatter, and it had not even occurred to her that she might need it during her truancy. But the necklace was tugging at her fingertips like a straining child, and it was pulling with such urgency she thought it might escape her grasp. She tried to shield it from curious passerby with her fingers, wondering why everyone in Kingsbury seemed incapable of looking past their own noses when they were impeding someone only to turn sharp-eyed at the most inconvenient instant.

There seemed to be nothing for it but to head for the coffee shop. To Sophie's surprise, the necklace started tugging toward the back entrance, where employees entered, rather than the front. The door was just inside a little alley between the coffee shop and a tired-looking restaurant. Sophie put an ear to the door, hoping no one was in the kitchen at the back of the shop. After a minute or two of listening and trying to restrain the tugging necklace, she went in.

The kitchen was empty, but Sophie could hear the chattering of customers just beyond the door at the far end of the room. She thought she could discern Howl's voice calling out a drink, but just then the necklace practically leaped at a blank wall on the room's left side, just beyond the sink. Apart from the odd crate of coffee supplies, the floor was blank. On the whole it was very curiously empty, given that the rest of the kitchen that was filled to bursting with dishes, syrups, and cabinets. From the scrape marks on the floor, the shelves that stood on either side of it seemed to have been moved.

Sophie clutched the necklace firmly and took a few steps back. The bitter tang of coffee was creeping in from every corner of the room. The wall could very well just be a blank wall. But as she approached, the stones on the necklace practically leapt out of their settings in their effort to go towards it. Something about it could not be what it seemed.

Wrinkling her nose, she scanned the wall and tilted her head. At a different angle, the light angled off the plaster, highlighting swirls inn the material everywhere save at a panel in the middle of the wall.

She ran forward and began tapping at the panel, trying to hold onto the necklace and wishing she had not said her spell quite so forcefully. It made keeping the straining end in check much harder. But no matter how hard she pressed, tapped, or pushed, the wall revealed nothing unusual.

Glaring at the wall, she stepped back and crashed into Howl, who was standing behind her.

"I'll have to ask you go to the front of the store, miss," he said.

"Oh, shut up. Did you move the shelves around this morning?" At Howl's surprised look, she went on. "Well, then have you looked at this wall yet? There's not a single shelf in front of it, no boxes- it's easy to get into."

"I've been working- and burning my fingers to the bone with those drinks," Howl said petulantly. "I don't have time for blank walls." But he had already moved forward and was scanning the wall even as he spoke. He pressed his palm to it once or twice, and then harder and harder, muttering obscure words as he did so. The wall remained obstinately unchanged. "This isn't helping," he muttered, looking annoyed. "Have you tried talking at it?"

"I haven't attempted to use my magic on it, no," Sophie said in a dignified tone.

"Which is why you brought in an enchanted necklace, I suppose." He took another look at the necklace, the ends of which were still straining desperately toward the wall. "Why do you have a- is that the necklace that longwinded nobleman wouldn't stop talking about?"

"Part of it." Sophie showed him the gaping hole where the centerpiece stone should be and explained her spell. "I think the rest of it has to be behind that wall. But we'll have to deal with it later. I'm not supposed to be here and you have work to do."

Howl looked ready to kick something, but then he threw up his hands. "Oh, who knows? I have a string of customers out beyond that door clamoring for coffee while this obviously suspicious wall is sitting here begging to release a horde of dragons or demons or goodness knows what, and since you've abandoned me under false pretenses, the whole building may explode before we're able to discover what is actually behind this."

Sophie snorted. "I'm sure it'll stay intact for another few days."

Howl looked disposed to argue that, but some very pointed calls from beyond the door leading to behind the counter cut him short. He gave Sophie a kiss and dashed off, and she snuck back out to the alley and out front to the carriage where the disgruntled nobleman was pacing back and forth in front of his carriage looking annoyed and worried.

After whispering to the stones in the necklace that they had done their job, Sophie showed him the now-sedate necklace. "As you can see, the centerpiece stone is still missing. I'm fairly sure it's in that coffee shop somewhere, but I'm going to need another day to find out where it is specifically, who took it and why."

Lord Twinings looked as put out as someone told the store was out of his favorite coffee flavor. "If it's in that shop, we should contact the guards! Arrest the criminal at once! Surely this is the only step to take…"

His voice trailed off into murmured remarks about he would never send any of his servants for coffee here again, and the proprietor could just see how he liked that, though of course "that would depend on whether Lord Claxley, who was an older worker in the palace, wanted some and in that case what on earth was he to do and how would he show that man in the shop just what he thought of him?"

Sophie wondered if Lord Twinings had ever made an independent decision in his life. "We could burst into his shop and confront him," she said. "And then we burst into the shop while the owner isn't around, allowing him time to get away and possibly take the stone with him." She gestured to the gap in the necklace. "It might be a very large sapphire, but it's still something that could be easily hidden in a bag or coat pocket."

The nobleman began to splutter, but before he could launch another half-hearted tirade, Sophie had shaken his hand. "I do appreciate your help today," she said briskly. "And I'll be stopping by your house as soon as I've gotten the stone back. Until then, I suppose you won't mind if I keep the necklace? It would be very helpful to me as I test out my spells to find the rest. I can write you a receipt at the cast- shop, if you'd like."

Lord Twinings eventually agreed to this, and after sending him off with a smart-looking piece of notebook paper detailing the condition and appearance of the necklace, Sophie was free to examine the jewelry at her leisure. She tried not to feel guilty about the way she had dealt with the man. Her talking over him felt uncomfortably familiar to Howl's favorite slithering-out tactic. "There's enough that in one marriage to last us both a lifetime," she muttered.

She was still poring over the necklace when Howl returned with coffee stains on his nose and an air of grievance at the entire world. "You!" he exclaimed as soon as he saw Sophie crouched over the workbench. "The entire day was endless complaints about the coffee being too cold, the milk not being cold enough, and even more people asking for ridiculous combinations of drinks that a code-breaker couldn't keep straight. I could barely stand by the end of it, much less do any investigating of any meaningful importance. Aren't you the person who's supposed to stay by my side for better or worse?"

"I'd prefer to stave off the 'poorer' part of that particular promise," Sophie said. "Besides, as it turned out, I did more through taking that nobleman's necklace job- that was too beneath the great wizard Howl in his preoccupation with coffee shops- about the coffee shop you can't keep your mind off of."

"Yes, you discovered a blank wall." Howl threw himself into the nearest chair and made a show of all his limbs falling into limp exhaustion. "Most enlightening."

Sophie shook the necklace at him. "A blank wall that this necklace, when asked, was practically begging to get behind."

"It's a defective necklace," Howl said with his eyes closed. "The missing stone probably threw the whole spell out of order."

A well-aimed pillow from Sophie collided with his head. "My spell was perfect," she snapped. "The missing jewel is behind that wall somehow, I'm certain of it."

Howl sat up and took a second to pointedly smooth out his now-rumpled hair. "Perhaps it is, but we're still no nearer to finding out why, or why only take that stone as opposed to the whole necklace. It'd be easier to find it if we were able to devote more time to exploring the shop, and that's impossible with a string of people demanding hot drinks all day." He heaved a sigh like that of an actor in a tragedy. "It's all hopeless."

His air of tragedy took on an air of annoyance when a sharp knock came at the castle door. "Oh, who in the all the thirteen thousand mad worlds is that?" he half-shouted, half-wailed. "I'm not at home!"

The last phrase was directed at the door.

The knock came louder.

"It's Porthaven," Calcifer said after Howl showed no sign of getting up. "Probably some sailor wanting a wind spell or something of the sort. There were a couple other people who came by earlier today from there too, asking Michael for finding spells. You're neglecting your regular customers there in favor of this shop, you know."

"Oh, don't you start," Howl snapped. The knock rattled again at the door.

Sophie groaned. "Fine! Since no one else in this house seems to actually care about our paying customers…" She marched over to the door, swung the knob to Porthaven, and plastered a charming smile on her face before swinging open the door.

A sweet-looking girl of about sixteen was standing in the doorstep. She had pretty curled yellow hair and was holding the hand of a little boy with honey-colored hair. He was twirling a finger in his curls and looking very sheepish. "Oh, hello!" she said breathlessly as soon as Sophie opened the door. "I'm Rose Grey. I'm sorry to bang on the door like that, but I've got a bit of an emergency. He- well, we've lost something rather valuable and we've absolutely got to find it. I know this is short notice, but I know you do spells- do you do finding ones or something like that?"

She said this all in such a rush that Sophie was left blinking. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Howl trying desperately to get her to shoo them away. She could hardly blame him, as finding spells were rather difficult to make and seemed to be seeing an increase in demand. "We can probably find something, but if you're in that much of a hurry, it might be better to go and look, wouldn't you think?"

"Well, yes but we did!" Strain was starting to creep into Rose's voice. "You see, he- well, we lost a pin that belonged to our mother- it was really old, you see, a gift from her grandmother and from that grandmother's grandmother and so on and she loves it a lot and she's gone out to visit her sister over on the other side of town and it wasn't until I got back from work and found him playing with her jewelry that I realized it was gone and I don't know how he could have gotten into it since that box is always kept locked-"

"It was open," the boy mumbled. "Honest, Rose, it was open."

His sister took a deep breath to go on, ignoring the clear embarrassment of her little brother, and in the interval Howl appeared at Sophie's side out of nowhere. "Sorry to interrupt," he said with a dazzling smile. "I'm the wizard Howl and I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. Did you say that the jewelry was old?"

Rose was not flustered in the least by Howl's sudden appearance. "Yes, I did," she said. "But what does that…"

"And you said it disappeared today?"

The girl paused. "Well- I'm not sure that I said, now that I think about it. I guess it could have been earlier? But I'm sure Mum didn't take it when she left this morning and that jewelry box is always kept shut."

"And you said you were at work- where do you work?"

"At the coffee shop a few streets up- I've been there for a few weeks now, since it opened, actually."

"And what time did your mother leave this morning?" Howl asked. "Was it after you were already at work?"

Sophie tried to kick him in a discreet manner, but he managed to dodge while gracefully moving to her other side and putting an arm around Sophie's shoulders.

Rose looked increasingly bewildered. "Well, no," she said. "I woke up and she was gone. My sister Annie was supposed to be in charge while I was at work and a fine job she did of that, I have to say-"

"Wonderful!" Howl dashed off to the interior of the castle. Sophie and Rose were both left at a loss for words, but before they had time to speak, he had reappeared with a little envelope with powder. "Take that and put all round wherever your mother kept the pin. She won't look there for another week, and by then, we'll have found the pin."

He practically shoved the girl and her brother off the doorstep and flew off into the castle. Within minutes, he'd rushed out again holding a charmed cloak that he threw at Sophie. Somehow within the interval he had combed his hair back and changed into an outfit so neat, dark and plain that it might almost have qualified as normal clothing.

Sophie glared at the cloak, wondering if it was the one that made a person look like a horse. "What am I going to look like if I put this on?"

Howl gazed at the angle of the sun and squinted his eyes in suspiciously intent concentration. "It's getting close to the afternoon and I'm fairly sure the Porthaven shop closes in the evening," he said. "We'd better hurry, or we won't get there in time."

"If you think I'm going as a horse, you're going to find all the labels in your bathroom switched out when you go to pretty up tomorrow." Sophie tossed the cloak onto Michael as he passed, and suddenly a horse appeared in the living room for a second or two before vanishing as Michael struggled out of the cloak.

"Sorry," Sophie said cheerfully. She went to her room and pulled out the shawl she had worn when first heading to the moving castle the previous year. "This'll have to do. Besides, a horse trying to go into a coffee shop would attract too much attention."

Just as they were about to go, Howl stopped as if struck by a sudden thought. "Michael, when you were in Porthaven the other day, did you see a girl there with curly blond hair in the coffee shop?"

Michael blinked. "Yes, she lives right by the coffee shop, she told me that when I got my drink. We were talking about work."

"Was the owner there? A fishy-faced man who looks like curdled cheese?"

"Perhaps, but I don't know! It was busy and it wasn't like we talking a lot." This was added hurriedly and directed at Sophie, who knew that Michael was very fond of her younger sister Martha. "I just got the drink on my way back from setting up that house by the harbor with the draft-stopping spell. And then of course it tasted terrible. Why do people drink coffee when it's so bitter?"

"It can wake people up much quicker even if they refuse to get enough sleep," Sophie said. "It's an enchantment of its own, really, though not something wizards seem to have thought about for their own magical purposes."

Howl rolled his eyes. "Oh, you think I'm on a par with a swindling coffee shop owner who's up to his ears in dubious dealings? I'm so pleased to know you evaluate my integrity at such a high level. Anyway, Michael, see if you can find that girl. Tell her I sent you and ask if she knows where her mother got that brooch. Sophie and I will be behind you in a few minutes."

Michael departed through the Porthaven door looking bewildered and Sophie and Howl crafted a few more appearance-altering charms before they set out.

They headed out into the streets of Porthaven and walked briskly until they reached a corner of a little street that branched off from the main road of the town. From where they stood, they were still well in sight of the ocean, though without having to face the odor of seaweed and wet boats. This particular stretch of street was designed for the people who liked to visit the seaside in the summer, and it was filled with shops selling colorful seashells, fried seafood and sweets, and the occasional pastry stand. And down at the far end of the street was a coffee shop.

Michael ran up to them just then, looking winded. "I found that girl," he said. "She said the brooch has been in the family for a while, but that it was rumored to have come from a shipwreck."

Howl looked delighted, but did not bother to explain. He sent Michael off the castle, telling him to find out everything he could about the _Telarise _and its cargo, and became deaf to both Michael and Sophie's demands for an explanation. As they drew nearer to the coffee shop, Sophie gave up on getting an explanation and concentrated on the shop instead. There would be time enough to explode a pillow in Howl's face or tangle him in an enchanted rug later if he persisted in being cryptic.

Though it bore the name "Fisherman's Friend" and had a few outdoor tables to draw in passerby, Sophie could tell as they drew near that the coffee shop was built in much the same style as that of the Bellatissima Cuppa. The chairs were the same dark wood and the baristas wore matching aprons in a shade of sea green. However, the prices were much cheaper than those in the Bellatissima Cuppa, which Sophie guessed was at least part of the reason the shop was so crowded. A line of customers had formed much in the same way it did in the shop in Kingsbury and behind the counter, chatting and nodding to every newcomer who caught his eye, was Caspar Sedgwick, owner of the Bellatissima Cuppa, and apparently worker at the Fisherman's Friend in a town miles upon miles away.

Sophie hooked her arm in Howl's, and they began walking towards the store. Sedgwick gave them a glance as he entered, but it was hard to say whether or not he recognized them. For one thing, the Fisherman's Friend was packed with customers. A line had curled around the counter from those waiting for their drinks all the way to the far end of the store, where a large wood-framed window looked over the harbor. The line of people did not end there, however; it doubled back and reached almost to the door. Sophie could barely believe her eyes.

Not knowing what else to do, Sophie and Howl and joined the line and shuffled steadily up to the register. Sedgwick was chatting with everyone who came to his line, and Sophie wondered with a sudden jolt of terror if he had some kind of enchantment that made everyone who came up to him talk to him at length about themselves whether they wanted to or not. Sedgwick gave Howl a sharp glance when they reached the counter, but the conversation only got as far as the weather and became sidetracked when Howl went to pay and realized he had forgotten to bring any money. Sophie was barely able to scrape together enough change, and only because she and Howl had ordered two completely plain coffees.

Sedgwick thanked them with surprising cheer for a man whose face was perpetually reminiscent of a beached fish and waved them to the end of the counter, where Sophie and Howl waited for their coffee. The machine clanked and whirled, preparing drinks for three different people who were waiting and fiddling with shopping bags or purses. Because Sophie and Howl had ordered the plain coffees in paper cups, they received their drinks after about a minute and received dirty looks from the people who were waiting. No chairs or tables were free, so they were reduced to standing awkwardly in the hopes that someone would vacate one of the little tables quickly. Sophie thought she saw Sedgwick glance their way once or twice.

After about five minutes, a pair of elderly gentlemen with canes and windswept hats rose to head for the door, still talking passionately about some kind of new regulation that had been passed in the dockyards about not trailing fishnets more than twenty miles offshore. One of them was calling passionately for some kind of rule about dealing with the mermaids, who he said had been tying his nets into knots ever since the figurehead of the _Telarise _had washed ashore.

Howl sank into one of the seats, cutting off a lady who was overburdened with grocery bags. Sophie took the other chair with an apologetic look and sipped her coffee to try and ignore the woman's ostentatious sigh. It scalded her tongue and she bit back something better suited for a rowdy bar than a bustling coffee shop. Outdoors, thick clouds began to curl up, and rain began to fall.

Sedgwick was chatting with a fisherman in a thick sweater damp with rain about the poor weather conditions. Sophie strained to over what they were saying. "Come on," she murmured to the room at large. "Just get a little quieter, will you please?"

Her pleading seemed to work, but the conversation itself was not very interesting. "It's been rotten weather ever since those historical society people started puttering around," was the first thing she heard, in the fisherman's rather growly voice.

"I can't imagine." Sedgwick's voice was sympathetic. "They're all after the ship, even though the captain was the one who ran off with the cargo."

"Is that a fact?" The fisherman squinted up at the board. "Just a large coffee, then, black and the biggest you've got. And I don't understand it either. It's making fishing pretty hard, with the historical idiots trying to hire every boat that comes in."

A clattering of dishes drowned out whatever his next words were, but Sophie could have sworn she heard the fisherman mention mermaids. She tried to hear more, but was distracted by Howl's shoving his chair around with a painfully loud squeak so as to get a better angle for looking at the coffee shop. He was peering around the room with undisguised interest and Sophie fought the urge to kick him. "Are you trying to get yourself noticed?" she murmured. "So we know he's here. So what? It's possible for a man to own more than one coffee shop, isn't it?"

"It is," Howl said absently. "However it's not possible to get from Porthaven to Kingsbury without a solid day's walking at least." You'd need at least a few hours even if you have a horse and carriage. And he must be working here in the mornings and Kingsbury in the afternoon."

Even as he said this, Sedgwick moved away from the register to let a fresh-faced boy a little younger than Michael step forward and begin taking orders. As Sedgwick moved to the back of the store, he seemed to glance Sophie and Howl's way, but a passel of people from the register came forward just then, and his attention could have been caught by their chattering. Both Sophie and Howl stood in time to see a small doorway, just visible between two display shelves stacked with coffee swaying shut.

They looked at each other. "Do you think he went to Kingsbury?" Sophie asked.

"One way to find out."

They returned to the castle as quickly as they could. Howl forgot his coffee at the table, but Sophie brought hers on the off-chance there was actually something in it that could explain what was going on. Once they got back, they found there had been a visitor who had come to the Market Chipping door, but once Howl ascertained that it was someone looking for an illusion charm for a fancy-dress costume, he had no more patience for it. Sophie twirled the knob to Kingsbury, where it was raining even worse than it had been in Porthaven, and they made their way to the Bellatissima Cuppa.

Just as they suspected, Caspar Sedgwick was behind the counter, chatting with an animated lady who was reading several drink orders from a piece of paper. And neither Sophie nor Howl needed to go inside to see that the shop was looking a little more crowded and bustling than it had the previous week.

* * *

><p><strong>I apologize for not updating this week. As it turns out, leaving projects till the very last minute is a good way to make sure all your free time disappears like magic. Who knew?<br>**

**Also, the friend for whose birthday this was written has done some amazing art for the first chapter. If you want to check it out, the link is on my profile. Thank you everyone for reading!  
><strong>


	5. In which time loses meaning

They both went back to the castle. "Something's going on," Howl said as they went in. "There has to be."

"He got from Porthaven to Kingsbury in less than…" Sophie paused calculating how long it had taken them to get to the castle from the coffee shop and how long it had taken them to get to the Kingsbury coffee shop. "15 minutes. By the looks of how he was behind the counter, even less than that."

Howl shrugged moodily. "Seven-league boots would be an easy enough answer for that."

"They might be- in fact- wait!" Sophie exclaimed. Both Howl and Calcifer looked at her. "I'm sure he must have used them the first day we were there. His hair was damp, like he'd been out in the rain, but his shoes were completely dry. But I don't think he could have used the boots today. It was raining in both Porthaven and in Kingsbury and even with the boots, he would have ended up getting damp in one place or the other, since he'd have to put them on and take them off outside. He looked perfectly dry, so he must have gotten there some other way."

"Did you say it was raining in both Kingsbury and Porthaven?" Calcifer asked. "Because that's rather unusual. They've got very different weather patterns."

"Who cares about the weather?" Howl said. "I still need to figure out what he's doing here in the first place. Those shops are arranged far too closely to the ones in my world for that to be a coincidence, and the paper cups coming from my world make it even more suspicious. And the Kingsbury shop only opened last week- there's no way it should be bustling like that. The Porthaven one can't be much newer. Even the best restaurants in Ingary can't get that many people to come in consistently that early. There must be something that's pulling people in."

Sophie shrugged. "It could just be people talking to each other about it. Sometimes places get a reputation and everyone wants to see what everyone is talking about. Remember the flower shop and how you'd charm the ear off every woman in Market Chipping to the point that she walked out with twenty more bouquets than needed?"

"That was different- the hat shop had been there before and people liked to go there anyway. I just buoyed along their natural enthusiasm. There's no chance a strange business could blow up like that out of nowhere in two towns at once!"

From the crackle from Calcifer's fireplace, Sophie could tell that both the fire demon and she could come up with situations where two different coffee shops could indeed be that popular. Howl was plainly not in the mood to hear them, and he flounced off to his work room before either Calcifer or Sophie could so much as get two words of explanation out.

When he had gone, Sophie immediately turned her attention to the sturdy paper coffee cup and it's cooling, bitter-smelling contents. It looked ordinary enough at first glance, but as Sophie swirled it around, she realized that there was a kind of glossy sheen on the surface of the coffee. It was thin and filmy, and unlike the milk traces she had seen in other coffee drinks, it clung to the sides of the cup when she sloshed the coffee gently. The film seemed to seep through the entire drink, in a way that reminded Sophie a little of oil and water that would not mix. The shine was hard to see, and it was only by angling the cup toward the fire that Sophie could see traces of it at all.

She ran to Howl's workroom and banged on the door. "I need a clear glass!" she shouted. "And if you've used them all, I'm going to go in there and clean that room beyond recognition every day for a month."

There was a muffled bang followed by cursing. Eventually Howl emerged with a thin clear glass tube and a thunderous look on his face. "I almost had something!" he shouted. "There's something in the cup, the one with the blue flowers and I was within an inch of figuring it out! It's in the cups!"

"And there's something in the coffee," Sophie said crisply. She snatched the glass out of his hand and poured a little of the coffee from her own mug into it. "Do you see that film? It's hard to tell, given how dark the coffee is, but I'll bet anything you'd like that that's where the enchantment, whatever it is, is."

She moved past him and took up the mug. Carefully she poured a little of the coffee inside, while Howl conjured up a soft ball of light that hovered over the mug and gave them a clear view of every ripple.

The effect of the coffee touching the mug was immediate. Something on the inside of the cup seemed to create swirls reminiscent of a cloud of milk pouring into the coffee. But where milk was opaque, the swirls in the coffee cup were shimmers, almost like heat waves distorting and shifting the drink. Howl's light, which Sophie suspected was designed to show enchantments, only highlighted the strange rippling. The disturbances in the coffee were all the more noteworthy because the cup was quite stationary on Howl's workbench.

"That's actually a rather good enchantment," Howl said after a moment. "We wouldn't notice the ripples because we're making so many drinks and handing them over counters, so of course the drink is going to get sloshed around. And not everyone is going to get the enchantment, since some people get coffee in those paper cups. Even then, I bet that getting a bit of that enchantment in you is enough to plant the idea of going back there. And maybe that time, you get something in a more permanent cup than the paper one."

"What kind of charm is it?" Sophie asked. "The coffee didn't taste of anything but coffee when I tried it in the paper cup, and given how picky some of those people are, I'm sure I would have gotten an earful if they'd tasted anything funny in their mugs."

"Oh, I'm sure it's tasteless," Howl muttered. "And it looks like some kind of entrancement charm, but I can't tell what it does."

"Let me take a look," Calcifer called from the front room.

They went to the fireplace and Howl tossed a drop or two onto Calcifer's coals. They gave a crackling hiss, and the fire demon's flames seemed to rattle. "Why not throw the whole cup on me?" he hissed. "But that's definitely an entrancement charm, though it's a good one. Sedgwick hasn't done anything like get people addicted to his coffee, he just makes them very, very happy while drinking it. And that's really all he needs to keep them coming back."

"And that combined with his good listening skills- no wonder he told us to listen and talk and get to know people's names when we started!" Sophie exclaimed. "I'll bet anything that combined with the charm would get people coming back in droves. Look at that place in Porthaven."

Just then there was a frantic clatter and Michael burst in from the Kingsbury door. "Something's going on!" he shouted, looking terrified. "The sky's come over completely black and the city is starting to… well, come see!"

Sophie and Howl ran out the door to an extraordinary sight. The streets of Kingsbury seemed to be peeling back like the skin of an apple. Cobblestones were flying and carriages everywhere were clattering and falling. Many of the horses had burst their harnesses and were running frantically back and forth, trying to dodge the stones. Some of the houses, the ones with brightest paint and the newest gates, seemed to crumpling. Their new paint was flying off in bitter-tasting clouds.

"It's… it's a time-reversal spell," Howl said in amazement. "They're temporary things, but they're almost impossible- I thought only djinns and things like that could do them! How was he able to…"

"Howl!" Sophie almost had to scream as the wind picked up. "The jewels! I bet he's using the jewels! They both came from the _Telarise_, and Sedgwick talked about the captain's escape in Porthaven like it was a fact!"

They ran for the Kingsbury coffee shop, battling against the wind. Poor Dorothy Matling was huddled behind the counter with a passel of customers who looked too terrified to move. Both Howl and Sophie burst to the back of the room to find Sedgwick trying to get up from where he was sprawled on the floor. A bright blue stone and an ivory-trimmed pin with a mother-of-pearl cameo were swirling in an open space where the blank wall used to be. They were glimmering and shooting off sparks.

Howl groaned when he saw it. "You idiot!" he shouted as Sedgwick tried to get to his feet. "I suppose you heard about the shipwreck, thought you could get the treasure for yourself! A time-reversal spell is one of the trickiest kinds of magic you can do and you're about to tear apart the kingdom for it!"

He darted toward the jewels as they swirled faster and faster. Within a foot of them he crashed into an opaque barrier and was knocked back beside Sedgwick. Now that Sophie could trace the barrier, she could see a circle on the floor near where the blank wall had once been. It was half-etched on the floor of the coffee shop in Kingsbury and half-etched on the floor in Porthaven. Through the doorway-like opening where the blank wall had once stood, she could see the coffee shop and the town, which seemed to be suffering from the time reversal spell even worse than Kingsbury. Thin, almost imperceptible rays seemed to tether the jewels to the circle, but they seemed to be getting more solid with every passing second.

Sophie looked at the blue stone. Something was flashing on it as it spun in orbit with the pin, and she had to lean closer to see it. This resulted in her brushing against the opaque barrier and getting thrown back against Sedgwick and Howl, but it had been enough for her to see what it was.

The wind was starting to roar even louder, and with a cracking crash the roof of the coffee shop tore off and disintegrated. Sophie sprang to her feet. "Howl, can you slow this down?"

"I can keep the jewels from getting to the point in time they're trying to reach, at least for a while, but it won't last-"

"Do it!" Sophie roared. "I have to get to the castle!"

She ran out into the streets of Kingsbury to find chaos. The time-reversal spell seemed to have taken out a significant portion of the side streets, but since Sophie knew one of those side-streets was used for getting to the castle, this did not help her. She knew the castle was vaguely to the north and the west of the shop and took off along the wide street that cut north, looking desperately for any alley that was familiar. After two or three wrong turns, she was able to find an alley that took her to the castle door. She burst in.

Calcifer flared up as she entered and his flames were a pale shaky blue. "Something's happened with those coffee shops, hasn't it?" he said. "I was afraid it might when the weather in both places was the same. Did Sedgwick try to do some kind of magic?"

"I'm not sure," Sophie panted, scanning the room frantically. She ran for the workbench and grabbed the broken necklace. For attached to the spinning sapphire had been something rather newer-looking: a silver filigree trimming that had been part of the necklace she now held in her hand. "The stones are flying about like they've got a life of their own and Howl said something about a time reversal spell. But Sedgwick was there and he looked as surprised by the whole thing as we were."

"It sounds like something stronger than Sedgwick caused this. So be careful," Calcifer said as she left. "Your wording is going to be very important- you have to make sure you get the stone and not the bit of necklace from that." He shot a flame toward the broken necklace. "Otherwise, you could send all of time sideways."

"Thanks for the advice," Sophie shouted as she opened the door. "It'll be a great help as I try not to inadvertently end the world!"

She raced back to the shop, trying to think how best to word the spell. When she had directed the necklace to find the sapphire, she had left it vague enough that the necklace had been the one doing most of the pointing. No doubt it had wanted to mend the broken bit that had come off with the sapphire. But she was going to have to find a way to get the stone itself, which had come from the wreck of the _Telarise_, back into the necklace, or at the very least out of the etched circle that was holding the spell. And if she was not careful, she might end up directing all the other stones from the necklace into the circle with it.

"Bother all of this," she snarled as she dodged a cobblestone, which disintegrated as it flew over her head. If the jewels got more than two years into the past, she might find herself turning into an old woman, depending on how the spell worked. That thought put even more energy into her legs and she managed to reach the shop at a speed that would have been respectable for a seven-league boot.

The door must have disintegrated, because there was nothing but a gaping doorway when she got the shop. Some of the chairs and tables had already begun to fall apart. Sophie burst to the back of the room and saw Howl standing in front of the spinning stones, his face lined in concentration. His hair was going through more hair dye cycles than Sophie would have thought possible. She stepped forward and concentrated all of her attention on the stones and the necklace. The necklace had been made with the sapphire as the centerpiece and without it would be incomplete. The stone might have been old, but it had been carved to be worn and she knew from Lady Twinings that it had been caught up into the necklace after the _Telarise_ went down.

"Listen up!" Sophie shouted at the necklace. "All of you, listen! You may be individual stones, but you're all part of the same necklace. As are you!" She directed that last phrase at the whirling sapphire, which did seem to have paused in its orbit for a brief second. It went back to spinning, looking a little uncertain of itself.

"You are part of a necklace," Sophie said fiercely, clenching the piece of jewelry. "So get back here and be a necklace! You're not a magic charm. You don't turn back time! You belong in this jewelry here, strong and repaired without any sort of break. If you stay up there, this will be broken forever and it won't ever be the same! Get back to being what you are. Get out of there and get back to this necklace!"

For a moment, she was afraid the spell had not been specific enough. But what it lacked in specificity, it seemed to make up for in forcefulness of will. The sapphire bucked, throwing the brooch into a wobbly spiral, and began to strain against the lines that tethered it to the circle. One or two of the rays that were shooting up out of the circle vanished.

Beyond the straining stones into the Porthaven coffee shop, which had almost completely disintegrated under the effects of the spell, Sophie could see through the window that overlooked the harbor. A ghostly ship was in the harbor, bucking and twisting as if it was being buffeted by something underwater. Sophie thought she could see the sails flickering in and out of focus. "Come on!" she called to the sapphire, trying to make her voice encouraging. "You're part of a necklace, and it needs you, see!" She held up the necklace, which was straining the same way it had when she directed it to find the missing stone. "Come on and be a part of it again!"

The ship flickered again, but just before it began to turn misty, Sophie could have sworn she saw figures wriggling up out of the ocean onto its sides. A sudden flash of inspiration came to her. "And then when you're back, we'll take your back to your owners in the harbor!"

The stone flew out of the circle towards Sophie at a terrifying speed and slammed so hard into the centerpiece that she almost dropped it. With a wriggling snap, it set itself into the center gap and the silver filigree began to writhe like snakes as it mended itself. Sophie saw the brooch fall to the floor of the Porthaven shop before the blank wall closed up with a snap. Slowly the sky above began to lighten and clear, but before Sophie had had the chance to look at it long, the roof reformed with a clattering of shingles and wooden beams, looking stronger and sturdier than it had before the breaking.

Howl took a deep breath and let his hand fall. Sedgwick was looking dazed. "What was that?" he stammered, looking more like a corpse than usual. "I just wanted to collect the treasures that were mine. They were mine!" he exclaimed as Sophie and Howl both glared at him. "The captain of the _Telarise_ was my great-great-grandfather, and the jewels on that ship are mine by inheritance."

"If they were your great-great-grandfather's to give, then perhaps you'd have a point," Howl snapped. "But I don't think they were. If you opened those curiously fishy eyes enough, you might have seen the mermaids scaling that ship during that time-reversal spell. These were their jewels, by the looks of things, it seems all you've inherited from your great-great-grandfather is a habit of jewel-thieving. That and a total ignorance of magic."

Sedgwick looked aggrieved. "Not even you could pick up on my enchantment with the coffee!"

"We did find it, though," Sophie said. She suddenly realized what Calcifer had meant by something stronger causing the spell. "But I think he's referring to the fact that the mermaids put a curse on the jewelry. At any rate, I can't see you being strong enough to pull off a time-reversal spell."

"Definitely not," Howl said, who had recovered enough to start straightening out his suit and now normally-dyed chestnut hair. "The kind of curse put on those jewelry pieces is the kind you can only get from beings to whom magic comes as naturally as breathing. Which isn't you, by the looks of how terrified the whole thing made you."

Sedgwick spluttered at that. "Terrified?" His indignant tone was almost a squeak. "I used my magic to break into the house of the idiot nobleman who sent his servant here for coffee. He never realized that clerk of his was selling out his secrets to get treasure. I did all that and got the sapphire out without anyone noticing!"

"You're referring to Lord Twinings, aren't you?" Sophie asked "I wondered what he was blathering about when he started rambling about his servant the other day. But if you're so good with enchantments, why didn't you realize the sapphire was cursed? I bet it never even occurred to you when you broke into the Twinings place to wonder why a noble family like that was living in such a small and tumble-down house. And then when you stole the brooch from the house of the girl who worked for you, it was the same thing again."

"I'll remind you that I never took any of the other stones that were in that absurd collection, and I never touched anything else of the Greys! Just the one to which my grandfather had a right! He was the one who got those treasures, you know!"

"The brooch was probably easier," Howl said thoughtfully, as if Sedgwick had not spoken. "I think at least part of that might have been man-made, but part of it- probably the mother-of-pearl cameo- was part of the mermaid's collection. Which could explain why that family in Porthaven could keep it and use it, though I have a feeling they probably got their fair share of bad luck from it. After all the daughter of a family that could once afford a mother-of-pearl cameo doesn't usually work in shops."

Sophie nodded. "And when the two jewelry pieces were put together in the same place- that was what you used to get between Kingsbury and Porthaven today. You used the fact that they had histories in each place to make a portal to get back and forth between the shops."

"And as anyone could tell you, that's the equivalent of throwing two sticks of dynamite in a bonfire," Howl said dryly. "Two cursed things in a portal between places? The dynamite might not explode right away, but it'll get there eventually."

Sedgwick folded his arms and said nothing, looking like a sullen cod.

* * *

><p><strong>So we caught the culprit. But what to do with all that cursed jewelry, hm? Find out in the next and final chapter, coming soon to a fanfiction site near you! (soon being probably Friday due to being swamped in work and NaNoWriMo) Thank you for reading!<br>**


	6. In which stolen items are returned

Wind and rain were rattling Porthaven as if attempting to shake every house to the ground, while the sea was heaving and tossing as if trying to loose every boat from its moorings. It had been almost two weeks since the coffee shops in Kingsbury and Porthaven had been closed down. Caspar Sedgwick had been unceremoniously sent back to Howl's and his world after some interrogation by the king, and the Twinings family had accepted grudging compensation for the necklace that Howl and Sophie had refused to return on the grounds of its curse. The family of Rose Grey, who had worked at the Porthaven shop, had also received compensation and she and her family had been only too happy to give up the brooch when they realized it carried a hundred-year-old curse.

Howl had been telling Michael the entire story with extensive sidetracking, punctuated by many questions from his apprentice, while Sophie tried to mend a shirt of his that had been torn during the time reversal spell. He had just finished by pointing out the obvious signs of curse on the gems and Sedgwick's general ignorance of them, which Sophie thought was rather an exaggeration given that neither she nor Howl had really taken the rumors of the _Telarise's _lost treasure seriously. But the explanation had clearly left Michael lost. "If Sedgwick was going after treasure, why open the coffee shops?"

"They happened to fit well with the reason he had to be in this world," Howl said. "Apparently when he was in my world, he lost quite a lot of money trying to make a coffee shop there a success. So he ran to this world with his equipment to avoid paying up and decided to go after the family treasure. The enchantment in the coffee and the mugs helped him get people to talk to him for the treasure, which is what he really wanted."

"It was actually rather clever when you think about it," Sophie said thoughtfully. "He was a good listener anyway and people don't pay as much attention when they're feeling happy about something. Which is why he opened the shop in Porthaven before he opened the one in Kingsbury- he was using it to find out as much as he could about the shipwreck and got lucky with the figurehead washing up to shore when it did. So there were people talking about it anyway. It wouldn't be hard to find out who had family heirlooms rumored to be from the _Telarise_."

"I'm still confused," Michael said after a moment. "Sedgwick wasn't the one who did the time reversal curse?"

"No, that was the mermaids from whom his great-great-whatever stole the jewels," Howl replied. "Or rather, it was the curse they put on their stolen treasure going into effect. Anyone who put the whole treasure together would find time whipping back to the point when it was stolen, so the mermaids could get it back."

Michael nodded, but he still looked unsettled. "Mermaids can do things like that? They're that powerful?"

Howl launched into florid detail about the powers of mermaids, and Michael was looking as if he would never venture within two feet of the ocean again by the time Sophie finally cut off the stories by throwing Howl's mended shirt over his head.

"You don't have to worry about them," she said to Michael. Her timing was rather poor, as the wind and rain chose that moment to rattle the windows overlooking Porthaven. "The only reason they cursed the treasure was that the captain of the _Telarise _found out where the mermaids hide the treasure they take. Apparently they embed the jewels into coral beds and rocks to get ships to sail over and sink. The _Telarise's _captain found this out and picked their rocks clean, from what Sedgwick said." Personally Sophie would have found this a rather admirable undertaking if the captain had not abandoned his crew the instant the mermaids attacked his ship in the Porthaven harbor.

"Oh," Michael said. "So the time reversal curse is something the mermaids put on the treasure? But what exactly was it intended to do?"

"Help them get the treasure back if it was taken," said Calcifer. "A time-reversal curse doesn't actually reverse time. It makes the stones a fixed point and then drags them back through time- it gives the mermaids time to pull all the gems back to the point they were being stolen and then deal with the robbers. It's not a very effective curse unless the stones were stolen and kept together, though. But that doesn't seem to have occurred to the mermaids. When magic comes naturally, that sometimes means you don't think about how it actually ends up working."

"To be fair, most of the robberies would take place on the sea," Sophie pointed out. "It's not like the thieves would normally be able to go very far."

They were quiet for a second and then suddenly Calcifer's flames crackled over the edge of the fireplace. "The dust from one of those cups came out from your world." He shot a tongue of flame in Howl's direction. "And from what you said, he came from there. So how did Sedgwick even find out about the treasure of the _Telarise _at all?"

Howl did not turn around from his workbench as he answered: "After the captain of the _Telarise_ made his escape, he was smart enough to realize the treasure he took was going to have strings attached. So he sold some of it, hid the rest, and got his family into my world. Then he came back to Ingary as often as he could to grab the treasures he'd hid one at a time. He wasn't able to get all of it, though, which is why so much of the jewelry ended up scattered across Ingary- people would find it and keep it or sell it. So his descendants grew up there instead of here, and Sedgwick eventually figured out the family history. So he decided he was going to get his cut of the treasure."

Michael nodded, this time looking like he understood things better. "So he got sent back to Howl's world."

"And quite rightly, I think," Howl said with a lofty air. "He can deal with his money problems there like the rest of us."

"By running away from them and finding ways to slither out of any paying tasks?" Sophie could not resist asking. "Speaking of paying tasks, haven't the palace messengers been here once or twice this week? I talked to one of them today and they said something about wanting your help in getting the cursed jewelry back- apparently they're prepared to pay handsomely."

"And put it all in one place for the king?" Howl said. "Not likely. They can find their own jewelry. And if we're on the subject of jewelry, the weather outside is prime mermaid weather, if you're still set on giving the pin and necklace back."

Sophie took a look at the churning weather. "Oh, I'm the one who has to give it back, am I? You're the one who said you'd have an enchantment-repelling charm and the ear-plugs ready by the time we were going to give the jewels back."

"The cloaks are in the closet," Michael pointed out.

"I am not giving the necklace back to the mermaids as a red-bearded man," Sophie said firmly. "The mermaids enchant men and drag to the depths for eating, remember?" She gave a dramatic sigh worthy of Howl. "It looks like I'm going to get soaked to the skin in any case, so I don't suppose you'd at least have the ear-plugs?"

"Which is it?" Howl asked with a put-upon air. "First it's a rain-repelling charm and then ear-plugs to stop enchantment. I'm not a machine and I've had to finish two sets of enchantment-repelling ear plugs all by myself tonight!"

"Well, I'll be temporarily wet without the one and permanently underwater without the other. And two sets of earplugs? You practically turned into a quaking jelly at the thought of poking around the _Telarise_ because of the mermaids not two weeks ago!"

"And let you take all the credit with the mermaids for giving back their jewelry?" Howl returned. "Not a chance. I have my pride, you know."

"I should get the credit," Sophie pointed out, "as I was the one to find it and mend it." But she smiled as she said it. She knew well enough that Howl would be coming to make sure the mermaids' songs did not cause her to walk out into the harbor, even if he would not say so openly.

After about half an hour, the plugs to stave off the mermaids songs were ready. Neither Howl nor Sophie took a cloak, for as Howl explained to Michael, it was safer to use as little magic as possible when approaching beings that used magic as easily as breathing. So they took the earplugs and the jewelry and nothing more. Sophie left Michael with instructions to make the blankets in the living room heated for when she and Howl got back. Howl had also urged him to try and scour the remains of enchantment out of the mug as an exercise in charm removal, but Sophie had stage-whispered that the blankets were more important. Given the weather outside, they were going to be soaked to the skin before getting down the street, let alone reaching the harbor and returning the necklace.

It was much too loud outside to talk or even shout. Rain was pelting down in cold sheets, which flashed like falling mirrors when lightning lit up the sky. Thunder rolled overhead, and as Howl and Sophie hurried down Porthaven's narrow walkways, the crash of waves grew louder and louder. They were a ceaseless roar that blended seamlessly with the wind and rain, and it was not until they reached the bottom of the street that opened onto the docks that Sophie and Howl could catch ghostly strains of eerie, beautiful music.

Sophie took a step forward without thinking and then remembered the plugs. She grabbed her set and jammed them into her ears with difficulty, given her numbed fingers. The necklace was beginning to take on a life of its own as she and Howl made sure the earplugs were secure, the ends beginning to strain and dance in her hands as she held it. She barely paid it any attention, however, as Howl had been caught by the music more badly than she had. It took all her strengths to get him to stay still long enough to get the earplugs into his hand, and only then did he seem to remember what they were for. Once he had gotten them in place his face cleared and he gestured to the skies ahead, adopting an air of misery. It was clear he wanted her to get the necklace to the mermaids as quickly as possible.

They made their way to the edge of the harbor cautiously. The waves rolling in were strong enough that some of them were overwhelming the docks. Spray was crashing and flying everywhere. Sophie and Howl scanned the waves, looking for something, anything, that would indicate the presence of mermaids. This was made much more difficult by the fact that there was no way to see except the intermittent flashes of lightning.

After several frustrated minutes of scanning the waves, Howl finally tapped Sophie on the shoulder and mimed taking out her earplugs. He took her hand firmly in his and mimed this once more, pointing her, before she understood. The mermaids were not going to be found by stumbling around in the dark. If she wanted to get the mermaids attention, she was going to have to be able to detect them. And the only way to do that would be by hearing them.

She trusted Howl to make sure she did not walk off the dock, but all the same, she could feel her hands shaking as she took out the earplugs. She reminded herself firmly that in all the stories, mermaids only went after men, which meant that they would likely not be trying to drag her to the depths with their song. Nevertheless, the intent of the song would not matter if it got her to walk off the dock in search of it. She felt Howl grip her hand and held it back. Then she raised the necklace and called out as loudly as she could, "Here! I have some of your treasure that was stolen by the _Telarise_!"

She put all her will into letting her voice carry and be heard. Thunder rolled and rain crashed, but there was no more lightning. For a moment, it seemed as if her message would be ignored.

Then she heard the song. It sounded urgent, as if it was a call, but though she could recognize it as beautiful, it held no draw for her- Sophie could tell hearing it that the call was not meant for her. Squinting out over the teeming waters in the harbor, she could see shapes dipping in and out of the waves, making for the nearest dock. They had heard her.

Cautiously she began to move toward the dock, Howl's hand still in hers. She was not at all sure they would not try to seize her as they came and drag her and Howl both into the water; the stories of mermaids that Howl had been embellished for Michael's benefit, but they were based on true enough stories, as the wreck of the _Telarise_ and the aftermath of its cargo had proved. She could give back the brooch and the necklace without having to set foot on the dock.

As if sensing her discomfort, a rich, watery voice called out. "We heard you- you have something of ours. You do not need to fear us, if you bring it in good faith."

Sophie told herself the reason her teeth were chattering so badly as to prevent her answer was because of the cold. Finally she gathered herself. "Can you catch it if I throw it off the dock?"

There was a pause, followed by a cold, rippling laugh. "Of course. Throw us the necklace and be on your way. It is not good for humans to be out this night. Even witches and wizards."

As the voice finished speaking, a fork of lightning split the sky into searing light, illuminating the entire harbor in white light. In that instant, Sophie saw the dock in full and was very glad she had not ventured onto it. Three mermaids were there; two clinging to either side of the dock and the third bobbing on the waves at the end of it, waist and shoulders above the water. It had long dark hair that looked similar to seaweed, shimmering transparent skin that reminded her of fish scales, deep black eyes set so far apart as to almost be on the sides of its head, and a narrow mouth with long, pointed teeth.

Just as Sophie had perceived this, the dock plunged into darkness again and the harbor seemed to shake as the thunder crashed. Her heart was pounding, but now her eyes seemed to have adjusted to the dark, enough to make out the form of the mermaids waiting. She drew back her arm and threw the necklace as hard as she could, just as another flash of lightning came. It flashed on the silver and the sapphires and on the mermaid's arm as it rose up on a cresting wave to catch it. The pin followed, and in another flash of lighting she saw the mermaids at the sides of the dock leap and snatch at it with terrifying speed. The thunder came as all three sea-creatures disappeared beneath the waves. Sophie could have sworn she had a delighted laugh as they left, and could not decide whether relief or terror was the stronger answering sensation. They were gone.

She and Howl were over halfway back to the castle before he finally took out his earplugs. His face was white when Sophie could see it, though she was not sure if that was the lightning. They did not speak until they had reached the street with the castle.

"Well," Howl said as they huddled against it. "That was an adventure I'm going to avoid for the rest of my life. Thank heaven mermaids are confined to the water."

Sophie laughed, despite her chattering teeth. "Is that why I was the one who had to throw the necklace back, to prevent your having to face that adventure?"

"If you'd wanted me to walk off the dock, I'd rather do it in the daytime and in warmer weather," Howl said with a beleaguered air. "Let's get inside and let the mermaids have their fun on the first winter storm. I need a drink. Preferably something strong."

Sophie smiled. "Coffee, then?"

Howl's vehement argument against that option was cut short by Michael opening the door.

* * *

><p><strong>And there you have it! It's probably cheating to have an info-dump chapter in a DWJ canon, but I cannot tell you how many times I've read a story of hers and wished desperately for a wrap-up where everyone sits down and goes "Okay, here's what happened from the beginning." Also without this, we would never have found out how Sedgwick even ended up here because I am terrible at sprinkling info through a story the way you're supposed to for mysteries.<br>**

**Thank you everyone for reading! And remember- avoid old jewelry and be wary of coffee shops.**


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